Leaving VCFA 3

The last in the series

I taught there so long that I remember when Dick Hathaway, the amiable statue by the fountain in front of College Hall, was a real person teaching in the Adult Degree Program and presiding most entertainingly over the Writing Program’s annual auctions.

I taught so long that I estimate my hard drive preserves easily 4-5,000 pages of letters written to students.

I taught so long students made up names for me, then had time to forget them and make up new ones. The Structure Nazi, the Shredder.

I taught so long that students began to publish stories about me.

Here’s the opening of Robin Oliveira’s “How to Write a Story in an as yet Undetermined Number of Difficult Steps, Or a Love Story, of Sorts, Or the True Nature of Friendship, Or How to Save the World.”

When I call my writing instructor for a conference, he complains about how much hand-holding I need.

I remind him that I already warned him how much trouble I am and besides, he was the one who established the telephone conferences in the first place.  If he is living such a busy life, I say, why doesn’t he just hang up now?

And he says, Oh, shut up.  Then he talks to me for an hour about a problematic story I am writing.  Before he rings off, he says, meet me at that bar in Bonner at six.

I seem both to exasperate and intrigue him.

And here’s the opening of Mark Maxwell’s “The Algebra of Fiction.”

“Every story is an algebraic equation,” said the professor in turtleneck and tweed sport coat. “A wants B but can’t get it because of C.” I know he’s right, of course. It doesn’t much matter who or what B is. Or how C has inhibited A’s ability to get B. Suffice it to say that for every A, it follows that a B will come along sooner or later and capture A’s attention, thus driving A’s desire. And for every B, there will always be a C that wiggles in between A and his B. Once A understands and accepts that the only route to B is through or over C, he will begin to devise a plan, perhaps enlisting or employing D to help him overcome C in his effort to attain B. A and D will then conduct themselves according to the laws of E in the place known as F, whose climate is usually G, but on this particular day, it happens that the atmospheric conditions, and indeed the pervasive mood of F are surprisingly H, which will cause A to remark, “I,” leaving D feeling unappreciated, at which point D will abandon A, saying, “You’re on your own, buddy.”

I achieved peak recognition at VCFA in 2016 when the college announced the Glover Fund for Writers, Authors, & Publishers, named after me. This happened in the usual way. A former student of mine endowed a largish chunk of money to the Artists Development Fund with the stipulation that a portion be set aside, in my name, as a special source of money for writers. You can still see the original VCFA news announcement here and here.

Cutout from the 2016 Artists Development Fund brochure.

I was chuffed, though I didn’t really understand how the raising of money and granting of awards worked. As far as I know, no one applied for or received money from the Glover Fund. Possibly, it just flowed into the general scholarship fund in some subterranean fashion. And the designation has disappeared from the college website. I can’t find any reference to it later than 2019 when an auction was held to raise money for the “Douglas Glover Fund for Writers, Author, & Publishers, which supports scholarships for students in our writing programs.”

Let this be a lesson to future VCFA donors. Your treasured monuments are ephemeral; time immemorial lasts about four years. Though, perhaps I am wrong, perhaps the Glover Fund still exists somewhere deep in the VCFA accounting software. I remain grateful for the moment, and, more importantly, I rendezvous with that student now and then at the Cornerstone Pub in Barre.

It’s easy, perhaps, to think that VCFA was my entire life for, yea, these many years. But it was always a parttime job, and I taught at Skidmore College, the University at Albany, Colgate University, the University of New Brunswick, and Davidson College (where I was the McGee Professor of writing in 2005) simultaneously. But teaching anywhere never amounted to more than a money-making avocation. I also brought up two sons, produced a radio show, and wrote several books, one or two being quite notorious.

Yet those years are dense with memory.

Best of all, I remember Louise Crowley, the spirit of the place for almost my entire time at VCFA. They named a building after her. Hopefully, the building and the name will last longer than the Glover Fund. It has only grown on me over the years, especially since her retirement, what valiant battles Louise must have fought to protect the program from the wayward and destructive impulses of various owners, administrators, faculty, and students (looking back it is fascinating to track the rise of the destructive impulse, the fading of the Dewey dream). Louise was always calm, never ruffled, always ready to shut the office door and talk things through, always ready to make a judgement call, a hard decision, also always willing to bend and compromise, taking the long view and keeping the train on the tracks. I retain a cherished image of Louise and Melissa Fisher laughing together at the top of the stairs at College Hall.

I remember Mark Cox for his poetry but also for being the best faculty chair ever. He took over after Roger Weingarten left, and, with Louise Crowley, hammered out an entirely new, transparent, and democratic governance system for the program. I remember him presiding anxiously over residencies. In the night, I might get up to pee (this is on the third floor of Noble) and Mark would be pacing the corridor, sleepless, an unlit cigar in his mouth. I remember unpacking in my room one residency and hearing Bret Lott coming down the hall, his deep voice booming out, “I LOVE THIS PLACE.” I remember sitting at the top of the stairwell in Noble talking about kids and family with Victoria Redel.

I remember the lectures. Ralph Angel’s lectures brilliantly enacted the lessons he spoke, a perfect combination of form and content. I published three of them in Numéro Cinq; before he died he was planning a book of them. (Later, hours spent drinking tea with Ralph on the back deck of our house outside of Plainfield, looking out over the mountains.)

I used to carry tapes of Larry Sutin’s best extemporaneous talks in my car to listen to on long drives. I recall with huge affection Dave Jauss’s melancholy decency. Also Chris Noel’s hilarious readings, the legend-turned-into-fiction of the death of his lover, and his Big Foot obsessions. Teaching workshop with Nance van Winckel and her amazing off-the-page classes (and her contributions to the magazine, teaching us all the words can be objects of art and poetry can be more than just words). Burgers at McGillicuddy’s with Philip Graham. Long walks up the windswept hill in winter.

I got to know so many students so well over the semesters. Long intense correspondence, intense phone calls. But the most satisfying relationships extended beyond the semester, even beyond VCFA. The masthead and archive pages of Numéro Cinq are studded with their names. (The Holy Book of Literary Craft is largely built on contributions from my students.) I watched them blossom into confident writers, professionals, over the years they worked at the magazine. To name a few: Rich Farrell, Jason DeYoung, Laura Warrell, Frank Richardson, Carolyn Ogburn, Gary Garvin, Jason Lucarelli, Tom Faure, Bruce Stone, A. Anupama, Steven Axelrod, Ben Woodard, and Natalia Sarkissian. I invite you to look at their astonishing contributions. (It’s worth mentioning that NC took no submissions. We had no slush pile and no readers. The people on the masthead were contributors and editors, they wrote for the magazine.)

These and many others I cherish because I watched them struggle, grow, and come into themselves, which is the blessing conferred upon teachers.